What is powerful:  Collaboration around the design of the curriculum?  Or collaboration around the implementation of curriculum?

I am not trying to dichotomise this concept, but rather look at the individuality of Schools and consider what is the most powerful way for us to collaborate around curriculum.

Let us consider collaboration around curriculum design.  Every School is an individual and unique place, based on its own values and beliefs as well as its own paradigms.  We all look at this through a different lens.  Curriculum design therefore needs to reflect this, while the framework may be shared, the individual school’s curriculum should reflect its values and beliefs and those of its community.  This said, when is the right time to design a curriculum framework?  Given that age old saying (and possibly another one of those ICT-PD Cluster cliches) ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’, unless we have the grounding in pedagogy, purpose, understanding of our learners and their paradigms (which can be argued as part of curriculum design anyway)… then the change brought on by this ‘fast-tracked’ approach and development will not be as significant as we hope – or it will be the ‘first order’ change, which is fine… but not really the change we hope to implement.  So would it be best to start looking at curriculum design once we (our teachers and communities inclusive) have a better understanding of 21st century learning and can have wider and greater involvement and sharing of this process?  This gives rise to another concern chipping away in the back of my mind… if a select group designs and asks for this to be implemented, what are the chances that we are going to see quality changes at the classroom level?  Are we in danger of having a 21st century framework that will be implemented the 20th century way?  Collaboration around curriculum design must therefore be inclusive as well as based on sound understandings of pedagogy, purpose, and understanding of our learners and their paradigms. Learning and curriculum is too complex and dynamic to fit into a nice neat box in a ‘cut and paste’ fashion.

The second part of the question is also highly relevant.  For 21st century curriculum, it is fine for different schools to have different curriculum design (in fact as I argue above, this should be encouraged), but the power in curriculum collaboration is in the shared implementation and exploration of learning with the curriculum.  This can look so different and be so powerful, especially with the tools available to us now with ICT.  The point here is that, while framework and design can look different to every school, implementation and exploration can be collaborative, dynamic and synergistic (creative collaboration) meaning that we are working together on the stuff that matters… learning.

Answer:  The learning that happens around it?

I cannot put this off any longer.  It is now time for some backward glances and retrospective thought post the Learning@School conference in Rotorua last week.

Aside from the wonderful time had with my colleagues from the Stoke NZ Cluster, it was amazing to hear such passion and willingness to do something ’special’ with the cluster.  There were exciting ideas, innovative thinking and creative desire to work together and synergize.  The expressed desires from every School Leader are exciting to hear, and ensuring the action plans are there to do is the logical next step to ensure quality outcomes for our teachers, kids and community.

I am still adamant that we need ‘clarity’.  After all of the haze from the conference clears, we need to be clear about our vision, outcomes and the plans to make this all happen.  Without the clarity of, and shared agreement and understanding of, the goals and plans… this initiative will not amount to much more than 120 teachers doing ’some extra PD’.

As a group there was lengthy discussion around our next step being that we get into curriculum framework design.  My belief here is that it is difficult to decide what is powerful to learn before we have decided what is powerful learning. Are we allowing ourselves to be driven by beautacratic deadlines if we write our curriculum frameworks now?  I can see through my crystal ball that the whole framework will change as pedagogies, understandings and evidence-based practice takes hold.  So to dedicate resourcing to this now would in essence defeat itself.  I believe that we can’t decide what to learn before we have decided how we will learn it!

Sometimes when you look for clarity it helps to prioritise… and ask, What is most important right now?  In order to gain some clarity for the Cluster, I believe that this is what we need to ask ourselves now.  Is this next step of curriculum framework more important than

- Student Learning?

- Teacher Learning?

- Community Learning?

I believe that the natural progression is learning before curriculum.  Curriculum is a ‘parallel’ it can run alongside, but to me the most important element to this is the understanding of pedagogy and the importance of asserting ourselves as learners first… after all, how can we ever expect to understand teaching, if we do not understand learning?  To me, these come from the same principle… teaching and learning are one in the same, if you pick up one end of the stick – you pick up the other (whether you like it or not).

Gee, let’s not overdo this word.  Call it what you will, but your journey is about your own learning from birth until you pass on from this existence.   I hear this word ‘Journey’ so often used to describe the ICT-PD and it doesn’t sit well with me – a journey denotes and end point… our learning should not, can not and will not end immediately after the conclusion of the project.  One’s journey is much bigger than just ICT-PD for the next 3 years.  This is a minor scene of a much larger series of acts in a play.  To me the ICT-PD we are doing is a pathway, or a series of steps we must encounter to continue our wider learning.  How we negotiate this pathway depends greatly on the lens through which we all, as individuals, look at the world.  Our own frame of reference will dictate the learning we do and what happens to use as we learn further.